Reuters has teamed with Bear Stearns Pricing Direct (PricingDirect) to provide its customers with credit default swaps and interest rate swaps prices from PricingDirect, alongside its own composite. For Bear Stearns Pricing Direct, this is an opportunity to tap into a significant distribution network, especially outside the US.
According to Bob Rose, senior managing director, Bear Stearns Pricing Direct, “the partnership is off and running”, with a number of coverage and quality evaluation tests already under way. Michele Kelsey, product business owner – DataScope Pricing and Reference – confirms “the activity is already proceeding better than planned”.
Increasingly, regulatory requirements are mandating the use of multiple price sources from a choice of providers for pricing and fund valuation, says Kevin Bradshaw, global head of Enterprise Information, Reuters. “Bear Stearns is seen as best in class for particular parts of the CDS market, and now our clients have the option to source Bear Stearns prices and ours via one source. In the future we will look to build this capability out by adding our own prices and those from further partners,” he says.
Forging such partnerships is not merely a function of high quality prices, he adds. “One of the challenges with adding partners, quite aside from ensuring the quality of pricing, is their readiness to support customers in a production environment. Bear Stearns runs this as a pricing service in its own right, and therefore has both the fixed income capability and the production team. In other instances, the quality of pricing might be high, but the provider is not geared up to operating as a pricing vendor.”
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